On Uppity Little Snots

Like all teachers, I have this one student essay that epitomizes the forbearance required to mold young minds.  (I keep it in my pocket, for those not-so-rare moments when someone questions my commitment to the profession ... or pain.)  Its author was a child whose belief in his own genius was only outstripped by the arrogance with which he communicated it.  A sampling:

Debunking Kant's argument in full is now a simple matter of proving the self-evident ...

Refuting Kant is simple!  Bet you didn't know that.  All those professional philosophers who devoted years of their lives to understanding him must be embarrassed now.  Had they but known that a lowly undergraduate could render Kant irrelevant!  But wait!  Our young savior thinks Kant may still merit a place our intellectual orbit:

Kant could be defended on account of his belief that judgments of taste, inasmuch as they concern themselves with objects of beauty, are aconceptual, because aconceptuality effectively eliminates the need for education in determinations of beauty.

Huzzah!  We can keep Kant!  Unless ... unless that "could be" is conditional.  I fear this student's novel use of "aconceptual."  (It would've caused an epiphanic recognition of the writer's brutal genius in any reasonably intelligent person.  Lest ye be dull, the writer thwacks you with the cudgel of his savage brilliance by nouning his neologism.)  By now I should know better; but still, I held out hope for dear Immanuel.  Alas:

But since I have shown that "common sense" and aconceptuality are both little more than the unconscious cultural constructions of an intellectual elite, it would be naive to mount a defense of Kant on this front.

And it is, because he had:

What if I were to see a pile of shit that, for whatever reason, satisfied me in that way particular to beauty?  In Kant’s system of thought this example would be reckoned an impossibility, because "common sense" dictates that since I cannot reasonably believe that anyone else would consider this pile of shit beautiful, I cannot myself be satisfied by it.  In all likelihood it would not be considered beautiful by the cultural elite, if for no other reason than its being a pile of shit.  In this admittedly extreme example we can see the dynamic at work in the determination of the beautiful, in that, since I can only consider beautiful what I believe everyone else would, I am more than likely to find beautiful those things which I can safely consider to be beautiful.

Inspired!  Genius!  Who among you refuses raving?  The inspired genius speaks of piles of shit.  To be so inspired, and by such genius, is the a feeling few among us will ever know.  Treasure this, your memory of basking, then prepare yourself (as much as you, being you, can) for the reveal:

The world that Kant unknowingly created is therefore one of arrogant institutions and a timid populace, reluctant to find beauty in extremes or satisfaction in the margins.

Will someone get this man a MacArthur already?  He's clearly deserving.  Or are you unfamiliar with his oeuvre?

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

I've never taught this kind of thing, but I suspect that I would have considered this to be a good undergraduate essay. I'd far rather read youthful arrogance and unmerited pleasure in one's own ideas than the usual blather. Aren't most of these like "Kant was a philosopher. He wrote a famous book called The Critic of Pure Reason." [followed by a long quote from wiki, then the conclusion:] "In my opinion, Kant's opinion of beauty wasn't really right." Or do people really do better than that?

[tomemos]

Rich has a point; bless (but also laugh at) the undergrad whose horizons are still so open that they believe they can refute Kant. And I have to say, style-wise some of his writing is pretty good. I would definitely dock him for the shit paragraph, though (which, coincidentally enough is also a shitty paragraph).

[SEK]

Actually, I've never received better comments on something I've written than I did on this. (God bless you, Pat McGee.) The gist:

I'm giving you an "A," but come talk to me. You don't want to become an asshole.

But There Is Danger.

Office hours Monday. Don't come, and for certain, you're an asshole.

But this is one of those meta-points: I was a maximally uncharitable reader, and paid the price for it in the form of brazen displays of arrogant stupidity.

[SEK]

(Crap. Not fishing for compliments above. I'd like to think that I showed some promise as an undergrad, but know my utter assholishness outweighs any potential I might've shown. Tomemos is wrong. The only solution for my arrogance was the whip ... and I'm glad I got it.)

[Lou Deeptrek]

I am sure if the above arrogance is really arrogance then the kid might deserve a lecture on how not to become an asshole, but is it possible that he really thought - in a kind of naivete all of us "real" intellectuals left behind long time ago - that he could refute Kant? What's so unthinkable about an undergrad coming up with a good point and refuting Kant - I mean it is probably not going to happen, but isn't it arrogant for us to assume that it is impossible ? The kid has a kind of Zizekian oomph - both attitude-wise and example-wise - Slavoj likes to mention "shit" if only to upset the academic editors and readers, right? I concur with others that this is better than copy-and-paste from Wikipedia or things like "I really liked Kant, he was very serious in his explanations and I think he made many good points..." Huzzah!

[jacob]

Now I'm curious what the "don't be an asshole" speech/talk was like. I've had students I've wanted to warn away for assholery but haven't know how to do it.

[human]

True story: when I was about sixteen years old, I decided that I needed to find out what the meaning of life was, and that it must be found either in philosophy or religion, but I didn't really want to go to church. So, I went to the library and checked out a bunch of books, including Critique of Pure Reason.

I tried to read it and... well. The following Sunday, I decided to go to church and become a Christian. Fortunately that phase only lasted a few years!

[Rich Puchalsky]

I think that this is like what I've heard about young actors in training: it's better if they start out with overacting than with underacting. If they're overacting, you can turn their dial down. But if they're underacting, it's a lot harder to get them to turn their dial up.

[Ahistoricality]

I'm actually reminded of Richard Feynman's story of getting out of a philosophy seminar by asking for clarification on whether a brick was "real" or not.

And there are artistic circles in which a pile of shit would not only be considered art, but -- if it were presented properly -- High Art. I can see the conceptual artists' minds whirling into gear, contemplating toilets in gallery windows, stop-action movies of decaying piles of manure of different species in nature, Warholian pictures of peoples' faces as they take satisfying dumps, attempts to recreate the color and texture of craps with "found materials"....

[Sisyphus]

Plus, Ahistoricality, there was that woman performance artist who performed naked and smeared herself with chocolate sauce and rolled around in it ---- surely a shit allusion if not actually using it as material. (Was that the same woman who did "Internal Scroll"? I don't remember.)

There's also another artist (no, I never remember their names) who created "meat tapestries" and hung them in a museum so that patrons could experience decay. Fascinating! And I'm glad I didn't live near enough I could have gone experience it in person!

[SEK]

Lou:

What's so unthinkable about an undergrad coming up with a good point and refuting Kant - I mean it is probably not going to happen, but isn't it arrogant for us to assume that it is impossible?

I actually thought I could refute Kant ... and in a four page paper, no less. As you note, the best I can say for myself is that I was engaged; the honesty of the engagement, well, there's a reason I call myself an uppity snot.

Jacob:

Now I'm curious what the "don't be an asshole" speech/talk was like.

McGee's a sometimes reader, so I'm hoping he shows up and recounts it himself. (Consider this permission, Pat. Have at me again!) But in case he doesn't, here's the executive summary:

You like theory, and that's awesome. I wish more kids were enthusiastic. BUT -- and this is a big, bolded, ALL-CAPS "BUT" -- there are different ways to approach theoretical problems. I'll charitably define yours as an "entitled imperialism," because you believe that reading a tiny excerpt of a three-part philosophical masterpiece entitles you to lay waste to Kant's entire project. You can't do that. Only assholes can. Hence, the danger. You have to take writers seriously, study them, the commentary on them, and then -- and ONLY then -- should you assert yourself as you did in this paper.

Something like that ... only stretched out over the course of an hour, with many examples from the secondary literature on Kant to show me what engaged critique actually looks like, and featuring a young man nearly in tears.

Human:

There's got to be more to that story, and I want, nay! demand it.

Rich:

There's something to that -- crawling is but a stumbled, broken gait -- but the analogous problem here wouldn't be overacting, but SHOUTING ALL THE LINES BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I THINK ACTORS DO ... when, in fact, I'd made a category error. That's what SHOUTERS do, not actors.

Ahistoricality and Sisyphus:

I realize there are contemporary artists for whom shit might qualify as a means and/or medium, but that's not what I was going on about in the essay. I was trying to make the laughably radical claim that because Kant can't make assumptions about future people's depraved taste -- the steaming pile of dung on the sidewalk being, in and of itself, a work of art -- he must be wrong about absolutely everything he ever said ever.

[todd.]

Man. That was excellent. And you wonder why people find you intimidating? Who wouldn't worry about saying something dumb and being treated to such outstanding mockery as, "Lest ye be dull, the writer thwacks you with the cudgel of his savage brilliance by nouning his neologism."

[Lou Deeptrek]

Bravo, SEK, great speech indeed! I am presently reconsidering my own assholeness, or the conditions of possibility of my assholeness, to be precise, and I am becoming greatly ashamed of my previous unwise habit of disproving a couple of German philosphers before my morning coffee and occasionally even discrediting one or two French post-somethings right after lunch...

[j.s. nelson]

Oh I've done similar.
I have something that operates like a subconscious facility for the prediction of arguments just over the horizon of my reading. This would make me a genius if it ever truly produced anything original; instead it's a source of almost guaranteed despair. In my earlier years I would naturally assume that I had invented the ideas and arguments that I came up with, only to be later crushed by finding them to be relatively well established, and often hundreds of years old. In my latter years, this has generated a pervasive feeling of foreboding, as any time I have what seems like an original idea, I can be assured that it is often more worth my effort to try and find out who had that idea first than it is to actually attempt to develop it on my own.
I can think of no better example of how my earlier arrogance transformed itself into crippling anxiety than the case of utilitarianism.
When I was something like fourteen years old, I suddenly invented utilitarianism. It was so simple and clear! I literally believed, and informed people of the fact, that I had "solved morality." I thought I was going to write a short book to explain it, and it would spread around the world uniting people in harmonious mathematically sound arrangements of cooperation.
I even had concepts corresponding to things like felicific calculus, though of course I didn't call it that. It literally pains me to admit that my fourteen year old brain thought that a good name for such a thing would be simply "happy math". I started spreading the word and trying to teach skeptical peers and older folk about the glorious solution, never failing to add that it was I who had seen through the mist and grasped mankind's final salvation.
The worst thing about this whole affair was, of course, the end of it. It would be one thing if I had the contained embarrassing experience of being forcibly enlightened by a knowledgeable sort, and then having to admit my ignorance to those who had been the victim of my exuberance. But no. Certain doubts of my own caused me to lapse into a period of silence about my invention; a time during which I fell out of touch with most of the people I had told about it. It was only at the tail end of this period that I was fatefully linked to a page concerning "Utilitarianism". I would soon discover all my ideas were not my own, and neither were my concerns about them hollow. Thus was my shame sealed forever.
Most of the people who I professed my genius to will never know that I have since learned the depth of my ignorance. I can only speculate as to the paths these people have taken. An unfortunately high number of them probably remain in ignorance about most basic philosophical concepts, a fact that I have mixed feelings about. The rest, presumably, now remember me as a Damn Fool and there's nothing I can do about that.
The net effect of the whole affair is in certain ways negligible. The total number of people who think that I am a Damn Fool did not multiply disproportionately.
But from a personal point of view, it's still brutally embarrassing because it's such a simple example of how all the intelligence and exuberance I can sum up can be so easily thwarted by a certain simple and unpredictable ignorance.
As the years go by, the ideas I thought were my own are taken from me by my education and I am glad that I have not been so vocal about them yet, but I wonder if this fear will be crippling when the time comes that I need to speak up.

[Lou Deeptrek]

J.S. - this is truly a sad sad story - maybe you just discovered "Utilitarianism" independently and much much later? plus I like "happy math" so much better. On the other hand, I would completely cease and desist reading and learning right now - who knows how many more crushing disappointments life has prepared for you? for us?

[Rich Puchalsky]

I developed "happy math" when I was 13. If you'd have kept reading, you would have come across my pamphlet.

Just kidding.

Actually, I've written a book about the phenomenon of discovering things just before you read about them. You just haven't read it yet.

No, just kidding again.

Actually, I once wrote a novel in which a character called J.S. Nelson goes through life rediscovering things that other people having already discovered, only to find out a bit later that they've already been discovered.

Still kidding.

To God, we are all J.S. Nelson.

[JPool]

JS, as Lou notes, life has many crushing disappointments for us all. The knowledge that one's brilliant conceptual insights are likely not to be as unique as one once imagined is indeed of the crushing variety, but one that anyone (or at least anyone smart enough to reimagine critical insights past) is subject to being compressed by. One can either charge blindly ahead, convinced, ala Ayn Rand, of the independent brilliance of one's unique "philosophy," or one can become slightly more modest and try and read and take into account what the before people have written. I too greatly prefer your term "happy math," and while I personally feel that Utilitarianism has real limits to it's utility, you have a great career ahead of you in rebranding past philosophical concepts for today's highly competitive and youth-oriented market.

Scott, I'm not sure I would have graded you quite as highly (presuming I were competent to teach/grade anything about Kant; which I'm not; at all) if only for phrases like "a simple matter of proving the self-evident," but I really like the way your Prof handled it. That I think is the real lesson here: that arrogant little twerps can indeed be reformed, taught a sense of humility and made to appreciate the thoughts of others as well as themselves.

[j.s. nelson]

Lou: Yeah, "independently discovered" is a better way to put it. It's just like Leibniz and Newton, only if they were separated by centuries and one of them was utterly inconsequential.

Rich and JPool: I can't decide whether "To God, we are all J.S. Nelson" or "rebranding past philosophical concepts for today's highly competitive and youth-oriented market" would work better for my business cards.

[j.s. nelson]

And more seriously, despite my (intentionally) comically overwrought writing style, I am not actually crippled by anxiety at all moments, I just enjoy portraying something as relatively banal as having unoriginal thoughts in a tragic light.
That said, I work at an academic library, so I spend a lot of time there and as I walk through the isles I sometimes wonder how long it would take to index and at least look over every single book that seems as though it could be relevant to my studies, just so that I might be closer to absolutely sure that this thing doesn't happen again when I am more embedded in academia and the stakes are higher.

[Lou Deeptrek]

exactly like Leibniz and Newton, J.S.! you have inspired me to use the expression "happy math" more in my daily life - i swear before the cruel gods and this community of like-minded simultaneous inventors of ideas that i will use this phrase at least 3 times today in a variety of contexts. i'm thinking, for example, of incorporating it into a smooth pick-up line or making it a part of a mysterious utterance, maybe even all by itself as in: "ahh, the happy math," he murmured to himself...

how about anyone discovering Derrida's ideas before actually reading Derrida? has that happened to anyone expect moi? i believe i was deconstructing ideas and pretty much whatever came my way since i was at least 2 years old...